July 09, 2025 01:42 PM UTC

Trump Sending Global Trade Back To Grade School

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• by: Colorado Pols

Fresh off his victory lap from the passage of the least popular major piece of legislation in our lifetimes, which President Donald Trump naturally calls the most popular legislation in not just American but all of human history, Trump has returned to his previous pet project of wrecking the global economy through the imposition of his equally unpopular tariff regimen targeting every other nation on Earth–including places with no people–as a self-imposed 90-day breather after Trump’s initial tariff announcement sent the global economy into a tailspin nears its expiration. Politico:

Trump unveiled letters to 14 foreign governments Monday — 10 of them from Asia — threatening new tariffs on Aug. 1 unless their countries made renewed efforts to broker deals. They landed with a thud in the middle of the night on the other side of the Pacific, where governments were not given a heads-up before the letters were sent, according to two people from countries that received the letters, who like others interviewed were granted anonymity to disclose private details of talks.

Conversations with six foreign officials, four former officials, and others familiar with the views of the Asian governments that received the letters revealed a shared sense of exasperation over Trump’s approach. It is poised to further sour the mood among more than a dozen Asian foreign ministers gathering in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, later this week for an annual summit hosted by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio will also attend.

“We have no idea what the hell he’s sending, who he’s sending it to or how he’s sending it,” said an official with a government targeted with one of Trump’s initial tariff letters.

In addition to the belligerent, high-handed tone of these letters being sent to trading partners despite the fact that only a handful of countries have actually struck a deal with Trump since the tariff threats began, anyone sufficiently fluent in written English was immediately struck by the shockingly poor grammar and other rudimentary mistakes in what is supposed to be carefully-constructed and throughly vetted diplomatic communications. Here’s Trump’s letter to the government of Japan, ruthlessly red-penned like a failing 8th grade essay:

As the Daily Beast reports, another letter misgendered the President of Bosnia, just after getting it right:

Such embarrassing mistakes are easily laughed off by Trump’s diehard defenders, who are thoroughly desensitized to these kinds of amateur gaffes after years of loyalty to a man who commits them on a continuous basis. But to foreign powers who still retain some academic and professional standards at the highest levels of their government, these error-riddled threat letters betray serious incompetence in the White House that is no laughing matter. Even if Trump hand-authored these horrendously poorly-written letters, which seems unlikely, was there no one in the White House to edit them before they were sent to the world’s capitals?

Is this what Gabe Evans meant when he compared Trump’s diplomacy style to a break shot in pool?

Were it not for the fact that Trump has the power to crash the global economy like a five-year-old who cuts heedlessly into the end stage of a high-stakes game of Jenga, other countries would be in a position to laugh off his childishly composed threats as well.

Unfortunately, millions of jobs and trillions of dollars hang in the balance of this grammatical man-child’s whim.